The poverty discourse in America is a train wreck. You either find people claiming that poverty is a complicated and intractable problem, or you find people eager to make dubious claims about how some pet project of theirs will have dramatic antipoverty side effects. What you rarely find are people willing to shoot you straight about the basic mechanics of where poverty comes from and how to fix it.

This is a shame, because poverty is not a difficult thing to get your head around. You can even explain it in a few brief statements: capitalist economies only distribute income to workers and those who own a lot of wealth; many people in society neither work nor own a lot of wealth; and those people very often end up in poverty as a result.

Given this understanding, the obvious fix to the poverty problem is to build up a welfare state that distributes income to those capitalism neglects. This is how low-poverty countries around the world do things, and this is how we could do things if we wanted to.